Dear BERGers and SHAIRers,

 

Our talk tomorrow (Weds 31 Jan, 4pm in the Psychology Common Room Cottrell,  C3A94) ) will be by Dr Kay Sidebottom, University of Stirling – see you there! (or hybrid via Teams)

 

Pedagogies of Attunement: Learning from More-Than-Human Teachers

 

Our current ecological predicament requires a shift to a post-anthropocentric educational paradigm in which we educate for and about a world that is not ‘for us,’ but comprised of a multitude of eco-systems of which we are simply a part. To facilitate this, education should be enacted differently; we need to experience learning not as furthering entrenched nature/culture binaries, but as ‘worlding’ processes, whereby imaginary divides between individual and environment are troubled, as humans and the material world are revealed to be relational and entangled (Braidotti, 2019). In this seminar I will share the story of a recent research project which in which participants (both human and non-) came together to explore what happens when we cease to privilege humans as the ultimate instructors and holders of knowledge. In doing so we disrupted normative research methodologies, drawing on an ethics of care and relationality which extended the ‘teacher’ role to non-human kin such as water, plants and animals.